Beyond Diplomacy:Building a Sustainable Peace

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Beyond Diplomacy: Building Sustainable Peace

A Feature Length Documentary About Peacebuilding in Four Countries

After suffering through 12 years of extreme ethnic violence like its neighbor Rwanda, Burundi established a remarkable peacebuilding process beginning in 2003. However, in 2015, conflict arose again when the President decided to run for an illegal third term.

The demonstrators in this photo are peacefully protesting the President’s decision, and pushing back against heavily armed police. We filmed in Burundi before and during the early stages of the political crisis there to tell the complex story of how the country’s fragile peace began to fall apart when the President decided to defy the constitution. You can see a 10-minute Preview Video that introduces Burundi’s story here. (Add Hyperlink: https://vimeo.com/137625516)

We are now producing an ambitious, unique and powerful feature-length documentary that will include Burundi’s story of fragile peace alongside the peacebuilding processes of three other countries. The new film is called Beyond Diplomacy: Building Sustainable Peace.

The film will profile the peacebuilding processes in four countries– Northern Ireland, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Burundi: four countries on four continents, reflecting different cultures and different paths toward peace. Burundi is moving away from the peace it achieved. Colombia is moving towards peace. Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka have achieved some resolution to their violent civil wars, yet important issues remain unresolved.

The film, intended for a global audience, will offer viewers powerful stories of peacebuilding and reconciliation, showing what it takes to achieve peace, and how easy it is for that hard-won peace to fall apart. The breadth of experiences related in the film will demonstrate that peacebuilding techniques can work across cultures and in different conflict situations.

The aim of this film is unprecedented – to help viewers understand the complex process of building and sustaining peace. We will collaborate with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University to create an educational program that combines our film with a customized curriculum, disseminated on an interactive web platform for students and peacebuilders globally.

Thanks to the help of our many generous supporters, we were able to film in Burundi. We are now preparing to film in Northern Ireland, Colombia, and Sri Lanka. We expect most of the funding will come from large foundations, but in this early, creative phase of the project, we appreciate any size contribution to help us launch this unique and powerful project to make peacebuilding more visible and understandable for a global audience.

Thank you for your generous support!

Jamil Simon

For more information about the project, email to jamil@spectrummedia-boston.com. Put Beyond Diplomacy in the subject line. Also click on the links below.

Jamil created a remarkably successful, one-day Symposium called War Stories Peace Stories: Peace Conflict & The Media. Here is the website for the project. (Add Hyperlink https://www.warstoriespeacestories.org/)